Website: www.aucklandmuseum.com
Collections Available online; Not in any helpful way, unworkable site with images
so small as to be meaningless.

The Auckland Museum has a fabulous Polynesian collection mainly centred on North
Island tribal art styles. Adding to its share of the Oldman collection it gained
many items from local Maori as well as the bounty of serious collectors like
Sir George Grey and Gilbert Mair. Highlights are many but some that I especially
admire are the huge War Waka carved in the 1840's, the famous Kaitaia Lintel
and strangely enough a collection of portraits painted by a European painter.

The portraits were painted by Charles Fredrick Goldie between
1895 and the early 1930's, Goldie was the son of a wealthy timber merchant who
showed prodigious talent as a young man, so much so that no less a personage
that the former Govenor Sir George Grey pleaded with the boy's father to allow
his son to study painting in Paris. Goldie thanks to the support of his father
did study in Paris at the Academie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau for
five years, returning to Auckland in 1895 where he set up as a portrait painter
catering for the wealthy citizens of the town. But it was not his paintings
of the rich that gained him fame, but his portraits of male and female Maori
who possessed facial moko or tattoos. Tattooing as an art form was practiced
throughout the Pacific, but it reached its highest perfection in the Marquesas
and in New Zealand. By the 1840's tattooing began to fall into decline, so by
the time Goldie set about frantically recording the surviving possessers of
facial moko most to these Maori were old men and women.

As he aged and his models passed away Goldie fell from fashion
and turned to drink and depression. On his death in 1947 his widow tried to
sell his own collection to the Auckland Art Gallery but the Trustees felt that
they owned too many Goldie paintings not too few. Finally humiliatied his widow
donated his remaining Maori Portraits to the Auckland Museum where they now
reside amid the great Maori Art of the collection. This outcome is the perfect
one for Goldie's memory and for local Maori who still visit regularly their
ancestors at the Museum. The presence of the portraits adds a tremedous flavour
to the collection. Goldie was probably the finest ethnographic artist that ever
lived, though the term ethnographic artist was mostly used by Local Modernist
painters and curators as a slur and term of abuse. Maori, however adopt a far
more pragmatic approach feeling quite rightly that Goldie did much to increase
their mana when their forturnes as a people was at its lowest.

War Waka were the ultimate expression of artistic power and
mana for Maori and the Auckland Museum example is the finest surviving example,
it is beautifully displayed so the whole body of the waka can be viewed. The
size is tremedous and gives a clear idea of the power a war taua radiated amid
invaded enemy country. In the 1820's through to 1840, manned by one hundred
warriors armed with muskets and full cartouche boxes these craft were the pocket
battleship of their age and meant certain death or slavery for any person not
of the attacker's tribe.

The Kaitaia Lintel is along with the famous A'a god statue
from Rurutu the Mona lisa of the Polynesian World. Found by a local Maori while
digging a drain at Kaitaia Swamp in 1920 the carving has long since had its
description as a lintel dismissed being carved back and front unlike all other
lintels, it was then described as a roof ridge orderment which it is not and
as part of a gateway which it could be. At two and a quarter metres long the
Kaitaia Carving is just plain impressive, an artistic tour de force, probably
the most singular, complete and perfect piece of design in all of Polynesia.
It would be nice to say that the Auckland Museum honour this work of genius
with its own room, not a bit of it, last time I saw it ten years ago it was
stuffed into a glass case with six or seven other items.

However, we hope more imput from Maori people involved in the
Museum profession true respect for works of Polynesian artistic genius will
eventually see the Auckland Museum be what it should be; one of the must see
Collections in the World of Polynesian Art

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Unfortunately due to being a small institution without paid staff we have no
facility to answer general inquiries or comments.